The Cork firm at the heart of an industry saving companies a fortune with their old IT gear

REPURPOSING OLD IT equipment might not jump out as the most lucrative venture, but there’s money to be made in all those hard drives and monitors circulating around the world’s offices.

And one Cork firm is at the centre of the ever-growing industry, which it has been estimated could save EU companies €600 million annually within less than 15 years.

Little Island-based Wisetek, which was founded in 2007, is among the companies trying to sell a more environmentally sound and ethical vision of how to deal with the globe’s cast-off tech gear.

The company takes IT equipment considered unfit for purpose and refurbishes the different components of the machinery for other uses or re-entry back into a company’s tech infrastructure.

“IT is the fastest-growing waste stream there is and – although it only occupies 2% of the landfill waste in the US – it is delivering about 70% of the toxicity,” Wisetek’s chief sales and marketing officer, Mike Higgins, told Fora.

“When we see IT, we don’t see waste. Our mentality is that recycling is the last resort because that puts it back to the basic, raw-material constituent. The most sustainable, value-generating activity is to actually repurpose the component for its originally designed function.

“So we will upgrade the equipment, test them and we will either sell them as a component part or put them back into our client’s supply chain. Only if we can’t reuse it with our clients or build it into a new system, then we recycle.”

Wisetek head of sales Mike Higgins

While there are also good environmental reasons to pursue the practice, Higgins said few top-level executives realised how much repurposing their own gear could save companies each year.

“If I sat down in a room with 10 technology and financial executives on company boards and asked them what they do with their end-of-life equipment, eight of them would look at me blank.

“If they put a piece of equipment worth €10 through our system. Our processing cost could be €6, which means they are getting a financial recovery of €4 on a piece of IT equipment, and they also don’t need to buy new equipment.”

And the process also appears to be a worthwhile one for Wisetek, whose customers include giants like EMC and McAfee.

Accounts for the Irish company, which also has facilities in the US and Thailand, show it delivered a gross profit of over €8 million in the year to the end of October 2015. It has made an accumulated profit of nearly €2.7 million so far.

Illicit activity

Although most Irish companies dispose of their IT gear responsibly, Higgins said the figures indicated a significant portion of equipment was still being scrapped in dubious ways.

“Ireland is one of the leading countries for documenting end-of-life IT equipment, but only 50% of it all is repurposed or reused. So you’ve got to ask yourself where is the other 50% going,” he said.

“Companies don’t ask themselves if they get optimal financial recovery on their old IT and I want to make sure this isn’t going down the unethical route.

“There is an organised criminal activity in this and they are sending it to the burning fields in west Africa, where it is disposed of unethically and causes massive harm to the environment and to the people in that region.”

Expansion plans

One high-profile company that was caught out in recent times for illegal dumping of electronic waste in US landfills was AT&T. The telecoms giant was fined $52 million as the country ramped up its crackdown on poor IT disposal practices.

However the hard-line approach in the US could open up the region further to companies like Wisetek capitalising on the opportunity.

Higgins said the company will be opening a number of new facilities in the US before the end of the year as demand for its services is increasing.

“We have got a few facilities in Cork, a facility in Asia and on the east coast of America We’re just in the stages of opening a very large facility to support our data centre customers up in the Pacific north of the US.

“We intend to have that open by the end of this quarter. That new facility is purely client driven and by the end of the year we will probably have our third facility open in the US.”